A collaborative article from Adam Bullock, co-founder and COO of Multiple, the sports and entertainment agency.
If you're a football fan, answer this honestly: how much World Cup content have you consumed online in the past few weeks?
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How much do you consume about your own team across the year? Whether it's a podcast on YouTube, a meme shared on Instagram, or armchair analysis on Reddit, social media has a very big place in the hearts of sports fans. And in major tournaments, where the hype is all-consuming, the final whistle often triggers a palpable need to seek out the conversation online.
That's what makes sport so incredible. It isn't about watching a match and moving on. It's the passion and the allegiance, the devotion that doesn't stop when the TV is switched off. For many people, it's in their blood and, like it or not, we've collectively built a culture where the internet is the outlet for all of it.
As a result, generations, including younger teenagers, discover teams, tournaments, and stars through clips and creators. They find sports not broadcast in their country, replay old matches, and watch experts debate tactics, explain rules, and reminisce. Strip away TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, and YouTube, and that world of discoverability for under-16s shrinks dramatically.
And it isn't only sport. Discovering new music is a rite of passage for teenagers, and a social media ban takes a chunk of that away, too.
I'm not here to litigate whether the ban is right or wrong, and, for what it's worth, I think it's well-intentioned but porous. Either way, the challenge now lands on brands who rely on reaching young fans: find the workaround. The good news? Never underestimate teenage ingenuity. The kids will find a way, and the cultural pull of sport and music on under-16s won't stop. It'll just go underground.
So that's where brands have to go.
I'd expect youth engagement to migrate toward the spaces the ban doesn't touch. Messaging apps like WhatsApp stay exempt, so group chats become the new terraces where the banter, the clips, and the team allegiance actually live.
Multiplayer gaming remains open, making it one of the few mass environments where brands can still reach this audience at scale. And the living room reasserts itself: YouTube Kids and the big-screen TV experience become a primary discovery engine, alongside good old-fashioned broadcast.
That last point matters more than it sounds. Remember the power Drive to Survive brought to Formula 1? It was amplified by live experiences, such as the F1 Exhibition, F1 Arcade, and events that introduced new audiences to a sport once seen as the preserve of those with money and technical know-how. Take away the social funnel, and the long-form, the experiential, and the broadcast moment carry more of the discovery load.
A few years ago, my team was approached by the England and Wales Cricket Board to help diversify cricket in the UK to modernise the game and bring it to new audiences, particularly families, to future-proof the sport.
The result was The Hundred: shorter, faster, city-based rather than county, with double-headers featuring a city's men's and women's teams and more energy than the traditional game allows. Now in its sixth year, the stats show it's working. The lesson: when you can't rely on the existing pipeline, you build a new front door.
So where are the real opportunities?
Gaming is the obvious one with branded in-game experiences, sponsorships, and sport-adjacent titles that put you in front of a young audience inside an environment they actively choose, not one that's interrupting them.
Group chats and Discord demand a different mindset. You can't broadcast into them; you have to earn your way in with content people want to share – the clip, the meme, the stat worth forwarding. The currency here is shareability, not reach.
Long-form and live experience – the documentary, the activation, or the day out does the heavy lifting that algorithmic discovery used to.
Which brings me to the thing brands most often get wrong: authenticity. Showing up for young people isn't about chasing trends a beat too late or borrowing slang you don't own. Teenagers smell that instantly, and it does more damage than silence.
The brands that earn a place here are the ones with genuine cultural credibility in sport or music, who add something to the conversation rather than hijacking it, and who let creators and communities lead in their own voice. Speak with this audience, not at them. The fastest way to get exiled from the group chat is to behave like an ad in it.
I do believe sports brands will feel this ban more acutely than most businesses. But it isn't time to panic. It calls for an adjustment, a revised strategy, some clever thinking, and the willingness to think like a teenager.
